Do you plan to remain in business for 10 years?
Your project manager is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations. However, you, as a business owner, should be focused on something far more important: staying current with the latest trends and adapting your business accordingly. It’s hard to be relevant as an agency owner.
You could make a lot of money in web design ten years ago. It’s a completely different story today. Anyone can create a professional-looking, responsive website in minutes. Clients don’t need to hire you to create a website. They can do it in minutes.
Do my employees have the ability to use new technologies?
How can I finance their education?
What will the new technology do for my clients?
It can be exhausting to keep up with all the latest developments. If you are a digital agency, you will need to be an expert in CMS, web design, usability and UX, graphic design, SEO PPC, social media marketing, content, mobile accessibility, CRO email marketing, SEM community management, site performance copywriting, branding, animations, security, security, PR, strategy… React is the future of development. Angular was so last year. Who knows what tomorrow’s big thing might be? You may not have to worry about updating your skills as a business owner, but what about your employees? Keeping up with new skills is like climbing a mountain you will never reach and then you can’t stop climbing, or you’ll fall. You must learn new skills, not to be ahead, but to stay on top of the game. In the past, a carpenter would be very skilled and be able to use those skills for the rest of your life. You could feed your family with the same skills and pay the mortgage without needing to learn the latest trends. You would still have to worry about IKEA taking your business away. This unrelenting pace is not limited to IT professionals. It affects everyone. It affects everyone. Think about Uber changing the taxi industry, Amazon changing bookstores, iTunes changing the music industry, and so on. Or, consider marketing agencies. In the past, agencies would create branded content and then buy media space. This was a quick way to get engagement. Today, consumers aren’t interested in branded content. Marketing agencies are prone to short-term thinking. They are used to doing the same thing and afraid of losing clients. The result is that they create campaigns that fail and clients lose faith. It’s a vicious circle of doing the same thing and hoping for the same results in a different market. Sometimes, however, it can happen overnight. Dave Nevogt, co-founder of Hubstaff was forced to start and sell multiple businesses because of changes in the market. The golf business I started back in 2004 brought in $1million in annual revenue for six consecutive years. After that, there were many competitors, increased advertising rates by 300%, decreased conversion rates, and Google changed their advertising rules. After building a database of more than 500,000 golfers we stopped selling to them. The cost of buying traffic increased 20-fold, which led to a decline in sales.
